


Refraction

by lalalive



Category: Muse
Genre: Drug Use, Explicit Language, Gen, Horror, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-31
Updated: 2012-12-31
Packaged: 2017-11-23 01:14:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/616450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalalive/pseuds/lalalive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dom is an out of work architect in Shanghai who slowly starts to deteriorate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Refraction

**Day 1**

He isn't sure how it happened, but he's been fractured. When he looks in the mirror after she's left, he sees the crack starting to form. The long jagged line sprawls carelessly along his right cheek, a thin hole that leads to nowhere. Before he can stick his fingers through, inspect, twist and pull, it disappears. Dom tells himself it's the drugs and the whiskey, the chemical concoction lingering in his blood bringing him down low. Throwing water on his face calms his racing heart, cools his skin and eases his mind when he doesn't feel liquid seeping through an unwanted fissure. 

Without a second glance in the mirror, he leaves the bathroom dripping water across the floor. He doesn't want to look at himself anyway.

**Day 2**

They call her Candy, but everything about her is a lie. 

She comes apart beneath him, her petite body twisting and arching in a way that appears painful save for her ecstatic smile. He likes that he can break her, make her lose pieces of her iron shell with each rhythmic thrust he executes. For a moment, he thinks he might love her, but then he remembers he doesn't know her name; doesn't know what love is. They're strangers in a strange city, even though he's had her in more ways than one for the better part of five months. She keeps him around because he fucks her in a way that doesn't hurt, because he keeps her addiction fed. He keeps her around because she's a source of income and he likes the way her cantonese accent echoes off the walls. 

They never come together, but they're never left wanting.

She leaves the money on the bed and he wonders who is really in control.

**Day 3**

After three years, he isn't sure what he's addicted to anymore. The mountain of white powder before him appears delicious but tastes like nothing. Is it the high or the drip? The action or the reaction? It started as something to do, a way to prove himself in the bowels of Shanghai but none of that matters anymore. 

Canglong looks at him from across the table and Dom notices the kid is getting impatient. He's aware Canglong isn't a child, that he's nearly 30 and could beat Dom to pulp if he wanted to, but he's short and has a youthful glint in his eye that could charm everyone to his persuasion. 

Dom takes the rolled yuan note and all too eagerly sucks the line down. He cocks his head back, eyes closed and lips parted, leaning into the drip as his skin starts to crawl. A smile spreads his lips with an easy grace as he passes Canglong the yuan with a 'by all means' hand gesture. When he's high, he fancies the Chinese as gods. The red and blue filtered light of the club bounces of Canglong's skin and the glow makes Dom hard. As Canglong settles into the hyper reality of cocaine, Dom settles into his role as Ganymede.

There's screaming in his head.

The voice is not his own.

**Day 4**

There's too much blood for a typical nose bleed, but he isn't eager to stop the flow. It's almost hypnotizing, the way the thick droplets stain the sink and his fingers neon red. His upper lip is slick, so he wipes it with his wrist before reaching for the toilet paper. That's when he notices it again. 

The fracture is back. This time it's wider, longer - a break along the center of him. He assumes this is why he's bleeding, that force of being ripped in two is making him leak like a broken faucet. But when he blinks, he's whole again and this time he's scared.

**Day 5**

The threads of him are being pulled apart, like an over worn sweater. He kicked Canglong out of bed when he felt the absence of his cheek bones. Broken English and garbled Cantonese were hardly a form of communication, so he shut the door in his partner's face at the risk of having his hands broken by one of Canglong's many assistants. 

His face is caving in on itself, and he clutches the sink as he braces for the pain. It doesn't come. Eyes trained on his reflection, he starts to warp and morph into an unrecognizable something. The hair is his, but it isn't. They eyes are his but he doesn't recognize them. He's detaching from himself but he doesn't mourn the loss.

It's not the drugs, it's not the light. This time it's real. 

**Day 6**

He stops eating altogether. The movement of his jaw causes him too much pain, so he sucks water through a straw instead. 

**Day 7**

It's when his eyes go missing that he starts to panic, because he can see the eyeless creature that's meant to be him and he knows he shouldn't. The yellowed beige of his skin has folded over his sockets leaving a semi-melted figure in its wake. He supposes he's gone blind and is imagining the whole thing, supposes he's in a drugged coma next to Candy or Canglong or a prostitute with a triple word score name he will never pronounce correctly. But the ache is too real to be anything other than fantasy, and Dom wishes he kicked the habit when his brother told him he should. 

He tentatively runs his hands over his face, inching his way towards the mirror to get a better look at every crevice and cavern forming along his skin. Picking himself apart is like picking a scab, addicting and refreshing. Like snow small flakes of him start to fall away, but the debris is wholly conceptual. Memories collect as his feet only to be buried by a compassion he forgot he possessed. The longer he looks, the less of him there is and when the mirror turns to liquid he contemplates drowning in the glass.

He has no one to call, no one who would bother to care for him. He doesn't know how he does it, but he tears himself away from the mirror and walks back to the bed, dragging shards of his pride behind him. 

**Day 8**

At six, Dom learned how to ride a bike. His mother guided him gently down their quiet street and his neighbor cheered when he broke away on his own without falling. It was his first experience with freedom and he has spent the last 27 years chasing it down, but it never truly tastes the same.

He knows that he used to smile when the memory came to mind, but now it's just a picture of a past life, of a past him and when and where. The memory doesn't belong to him anymore because a shark has devoured his emotional synapses. That may or may not be true, he isn't sure but it's the only excuse he can fathom.

Sitting on the couch in threadbare black briefs, he counts his ribs and waits for the shell of him to become whole once more. 

**Day 11**

Shattered glass always looks like millions of tiny crystals, something that Dom thinks about as he inspects the chips embedded in his knuckles. It's been a week since he's smiled, and he likes that it's the thought of breaking himself valuable that finally does it. His reflection had disappeared completely, and after three days of waiting to reappear he decided to destroy the thing that swallowed him whole. He hasn't seen himself or anyone else in days, too scared to leave his flat, too scared of being lost in the too wide spaces of the city. It finally soaks in, like water to the root of a plant, that he doesn't truly exist anymore. It was a slow process of unraveling that whiskey, sex, and drugs took the edge off of but he's grown tired of watching himself fight through the exhausting haze of being.

Instead he returns to his bed and slowly lets himself become unmade. 

**Day 12**

Television static is soothing in its uniform ambiguity. The random pattern requires little attention to create an overall peaceful effect, but Dominic doesn't let himself become lulled into relaxation. 

The TV never worked, the TV could never turn on. It wasn't even plugged in.

He knows he isn't alone anymore. 

**Day 14**

Darkness shrouds the room, save for the menacing glow of the TV. Sleep has become a foreign concept, but Dom doesn't miss it. He thinks that should be strange, but nothing shocks him anymore. 

At least he thinks. 

He's been watching the static for two whole days and suddenly he starts to see. It's barely there, but he can see it. The dots have been twirling in the same pattern for 24 hours, and now he's noticed the change. Somewhere from the back, from the wires or from God, he sees the face staring back at him. 

For the first time in days he sits up, but he doesn't register the creak of his bones as they shake the dust off their joints. At first he thinks it's him, that he's found the lost pieces of himself and his reflection trapped between electrical impulses. But when it says his name, he knows it's someone else and he knows he's heard the voice before. He was high, too drugged and drunk to get a clear voice, but the screaming is back and this time it's saying his name.

Crawling towards the edge of the bed, he watches as the static takes shape; he watches as the static becomes beautiful.

**Day 15**

The stranger calls himself Matthew and says that he's the empirical half of Dom. He wants to ask how long Matt's been watching, but he feels as though he already knows, that he's always just been there. Behind Matt, he sees the pieces of himself that he has lost. They're so close, if only

he could

just

t o u c h

them. 

Two things are plausible: that Matt stole the fragments, put them together to make himself and let the excess drift aimlessly forever. The other, that Dom never was and Matthew always is, and Dom's efforts to break free meant forgetting himself completely. 

But he forgets those possibilities in favor of that idea that they both are the static and that's where he was always meant to be.

His right hand stokes the screen and he stops thinking altogether. Gooseflesh raises the hairs on his arm and he becomes an electric cyborg, kissing Matthew's lips. He's all flesh and bones, waxy and frail, and he's scraping along the floor like an animal with a limp leg towards its food. A part of him, he isn't sure which, burns with the proximity to the screen and he feels his remains dissolve. 

**Day 16**

Why would he move from his position when being empty h a s

n e v e r

. . .

it's positively erotic.

**Day 26**

Liqiu complained of the smell first, but she was new and Shanghai positively reeked. When the rent from apartment 26B went unpaid, that's when Guanlong decided to take action. He wasn't a picky landlord, didn't give a fuck if you were rich or poor so long as he got paid on time. When he approached the door, he almost felt like apologizing to Liqiu. The odor seeped through the cracks in the walls, made the molecules of the wood expand and the back of his throat heave. 

He pushed open the door and was bombarded with the smell of shit and rot, decaying flesh and bad breath. 26B was a small apartment, and he could see into the bedroom from the door. Records told him the guy's name was Dominic Howard, but that didn't matter anymore. 

Dominic Howard was dead, a skeleton wrapped in wax paper skin in front of an unplugged TV.


End file.
